Abdulaziz had a small plate with cookies at the end of our live event with DC. UNHCR brought some for the refugees, and our teacher friends wanted to include us in the snacking. Everyone from i-ACT, in chorus, said no thank you and please give to the children that were still crowding around our makeshift movie theater.

In a matter of seconds, the moment Abdulaziz turned around, a cloud of sand kicked up from all the children rushing the plate with a few cookies, the cookies flying in all directions, and the children diving on the ground, pulling and pushing to get one little morsel. They had a serious, intense look in their eyes. There was no laughing.

It felt very uncomfortable to see that. Abdulaziz immediately asked the children to move back and put the plate up high, where they could not reach. The little boys and girls stepped back. As soon as Abdulaziz turned around, children crawled on the ground and started to dig through the sand to grab any crumbs that were left behind.

It makes me uncomfortable to even write this and have the images, so very clear, jump in and out of my mind.

I have had many discussions in the past few years about why people choose to look the other way about Darfur. Or about most part a majority of the human rights violations and mass atrocities around the world. I think many times it’s because if we know, we bear the moral responsibility to act. But it is not just that. Once we know what is going on, we look at our own lives differently, we change, we grow, we hurt more, and we love more.

Tomorrow is World Refugee Day 2009: Real People, Real Needs.

Tune in to the live feed from Camp Djabal. It’s over several hours so please make time to join us. There will be an interactive, live chat and twitter feed through the website. Invite your friends with this flyer or leave them at a neighborhood coffee house.

Don’t tune out. Tune In.

Genocide, murder, rape. These are all powerful words that are almost always used in an explanation of Darfur. These aren’t nice words that people like to hear. Many will do all that they can to avoid them, look away, turn and walk the other direction, change the channel on the TV.

“Home”

Did that scare you? Did you turn the channel?

“I want to go home”

That is one of the first phrases children learn in life. Except for wanting to be with one’s Mom, wanting to go home is probably the most universal human desire. “I want to go home to Darfur” is what we continue to hear from so many people in Camp Djabal. I don’t think that a lot of people really understand this desire to go home, and the paramount importance of it. I recently read a comment to a Darfur blog where the person suggested that maybe the refugee camps could be setup as new sovereign states with their own governments. The person was trying to be helpful, but in my opinion, that suggestion gets it all wrong. The people of Darfur have been expelled from their home, and they want to return. A whole population of people being driven from their homes by their own government and not allowed to return in safety and peace, is a violation of basic human rights.

Day to day protection and shelter are basic needs that everyone understands, but the long term goal of returning home in safety and peace is something that people also need to understand and remember.

  I didn’t feel like writing a journal today. I am tired, short on sleep, and could use a good meal. When I saw the video from today, I cried. Not because we were challenged by an obstacle totally out of our control 10 minutes before we were supposed to be live and pulled it off. But because I am so proud that we were able to virtually connect advocates and survivors across oceans to build one community, actually looking at one another, listening and feeling at the same point in time. This is i-ACT: Interactive-Activism.

In Rahma’s message to Washington DC he wished for three things:

1. “al-Bashir needs to go”;
2. Secondary schools and English teachers;
3. For Darfurians to go home.

I know they were listening. I know you’re listening. Seeing again the images in today’s video that Washington DC saw, I could not hold back the emotion. How powerful the possibilities are now to connect the world and its advocates to the most vulnerable populations. We are almost limitless in our ability to make an impact.

ktj